The Seeds of Transformation

Introduction

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” – John F Kennedy, May 25, 1961

When JFK made his famous pronouncement in 1961, the United States was losing in the space race.  The Soviet Union was visibly ahead, to the point that the government shuffled the deck, bringing together various agencies to form NASA, and set a target far out ahead of where anyone was focused at the time: landing on the Moon.  The context is important as the U.S. was not operating from a position of strength and JFK didn’t shoot for parity or to remain in a defensive posture. Instead, he leaned in and set an audacious goal that redefined the playing field entirely.

I spoke at a town hall fairly recently about “The Saturn V Story”, a documentary that covers the space race and journey leading to the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.  The scale and complexity of what accomplished in a relatively short timeframe was truly incredible and feels like a good way to introduce a Transformation discussion.  The Apollo program engaged 375,000 people at its peak, required extremely thoughtful planning and coordination (including the Mercury and Gemini programs that preceded it), and presented a significant number of engineering challenges that needed to be overcome to achieve its ultimate goal.  It’s an inspiring story, as any successful transformation effort should be.

The challenge is that true transformation is exceptionally difficult and many of these efforts fail or fall short of their stated objectives.  The remainder of this article will highlight some key dimensions that I believe are critical in increasing the probability of success.

Transformation is a requirement of remaining competitive in a global digital economy.  The disruptions (e.g., cloud computing, robotics, orchestration, artificial intelligence, cyber security exposure, quantum computing) have and will continue to occur, and success will be measured, in part, based on an organization’s ability to continuously transform, leveraging advanced capabilities to its’ maximum strategic benefit.

Successful Transformation

Culture versus Outcome

Before diving into the dimensions themselves, I want to emphasize the difference I see between changing culture and the kind of transformation I’m referencing in this article.  Culture is an important aspect to affecting change, as I will discuss in the context of the dimensions themselves, but a change in culture that doesn’t lead to a corresponding change in results is relatively meaningless.

To that end, I would argue that it is important to think about “change management” as a way to transition between the current and desired ways of working in a future state environment, but with specific, defined outcomes attached to the goal. 

It is insufficient, as an example, to express “we want to establish a more highly collaborative workplace that fosters innovation” without also being able to answer the questions: “To what end?” or “In the interest of accomplishing what?”  Arguably, it is the desired outcome that sets the stage for the nature of the culture that will be required, both to get to the stated goal as well as to operate effectively once those goals are achieved.  In my experience, this balance isn’t given enough thought when change efforts are initiated, and it’s important to make sure culture and desired outcomes are both clear and aligned with each other.

For more on the fundamental aspects of a healthy environment, please see my article on The Criticality of Culture.

What it Takes

Successful transformation efforts require focus on many levels and in various dimensions to manage what ultimately translates to risk.

The set that come to mind as most critical are having:

• An audacious goal
  • Transformation is, in itself, a fundamental (not incremental) change in what an organization is able to accomplish
  • To the extent that substantial change is difficult, the value associated with the goal needs to outweigh the difficulties (and costs) that will be required to transition from where you are to where you need to be
  • If the goal also isn’t compelling enough, likely there won’t be the requisite level of individual and collective investment required to overcome the adversity that is typically part of these efforts. This is not just about having a business case.  It’s a reason for people to care… and that level of investment matters where transformation is the goal

• Courageous, committed leadership
  • Change is, by its’ nature, difficult and disruptive. There will be friction and resistance that comes from altering the status quo
  • The requirements of leadership in these efforts tend to be very high, because of the adversity and risk that can be involved, and a degree of fearlessness and willingness to ride through the difficulties is important
  • Where this level of leadership isn’t present, it will become easy to focus on obstacles versus solutions and to avoid taking risks that lead to suboptimized results or overall failure of the effort. If it was easy to transform, everyone would be doing it all the time
  • It is worth noting that, in the case of the Apollo missions, JFK wasn’t there to see the program through, yet it survived both his passing and significant events like the Apollo fire without compromising the goal itself
  • A question to consider in this regard: Is the goal so compelling that, if the vision holder / sponsor were to leave, the effort would still move forward? There are many large-scale efforts I’ve seen over the years where a change in leadership affects the commitment to a strategy.  There may be valid reasons for this to be the case, but arguably both a worthy goal and strong leadership are necessary components in transformation overall

• An aligned and supportive culture
  • There is a significant aspect of accomplishing a transformational agenda that places a burden on culture
  • On this point, the going-in position matters in the interest of mapping out the execution approach, because anything about the environment that isn’t conducive to facilitating and enabling collaboration and change will ultimately create friction that needs to be addressed and (hopefully) overcome
  • To the extent that the organization works in silos or that there is significant and potentially unhealthy internal competition within and across leaders, the implications of those conflicts need to be understood and mitigated early on (to the degree possible) so as to avoid what could lead to adverse impacts on the effort overall
  • As a leader said to me very early in my career, “There is room enough in success for everybody.” Defining success at an individual and collective level may be a worthwhile activity to consider depending on the nature of where an organization is when starting to pursue change
  • On this final point, I have been in the situation more than once professionally where a team worked to actively undermine transformation objectives because those efforts had an adverse impact to their broader role in an organization. This speaks, in part, to the importance of engaged, courageous leadership to bring teams into alignment, but where that leadership isn’t present, it definitely makes things more difficult.  Said differently, the more established the status quo is, the harder it may resist change

• A thoughtful approach
  • “Rome was not built in a day” is probably the best way to summarize this point
  • Depending on the level of complexity and degree of change involved, the more thought and attention that needs to be paid to planning out the approach itself
  • The Apollo program is a great example of this, because there were countless interim stages in the development of the Saturn V rocket, creating a safe environment for manned space flight, procedures for rendezvous and docking of the spacecraft, etc.
  • In a technology delivery environment, these can be program increments in a scaled Agile environment, selective “pilots” or “proof-of-concept” efforts, or interim deliveries in a more component-based (and service-driven) architecture. The overall point being that it’s important to map out the evolution of current to future state, allowing for testing and staging of interim goals that help reduce risk on the ultimate objectives
  • In a different example, when establishing an architecture capability in a large, complex organization, we established an operating model to define roles and responsibilities, but then operationalized the model in layers to help facilitate change with defined outcomes spread across multiple years. This was done purposefully and deliberately in the interest of making the changes sustainable and to gradually shift delivery culture to be more strategically-aligned, disciplined, and less siloed in the process

• Agility and adaptiveness
  • The more advanced and innovative the transformation effort is, the more likely it will be that there is a higher degree of unknown (and knowledge risk) associated with the effort
  • To that end, it is highly probable that the approach to execution will evolve over time as knowledge gaps are uncovered and limitations and constraints need to be addressed and overcome
  • There are countless examples of this in the Apollo program, one of the early ones being the abandonment of the “Nova” rocket design, which involved a massive vehicle that ultimately was eliminated in deference to the multi-stage rocket and lunar lander / command module approach. In this case, the means for arriving at and landing on the moon was completely different than it was at the program’s inception, but the outcome was ultimately the same
  • I spend some time discussing these “points of inflection” in my article On Project Health and Transparency, but the important concept is not to be too prescriptive when planning a transformation effort, because execution will definitely evolve

• Patience and discipline
  • My underlying assumption is that the level of change involved in transformation is significant and, as such, it will take time to accomplish
  • The balance to be struck is ultimately in managing interim deliveries in relation to the overall goals of the effort. This is where patience and discipline matter, because it is always tempting to take short cuts in the interest of “speed to market” while compromising fundamental design elements that are important to overall quality and program-level objectives (something I address in Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good)
  • This isn’t to say that tradeoffs can’t or shouldn’t be made, because they often are, but rather that these be conscious choices, done through a governance process, and with a full understanding of the implications of the decisions on the ultimate transformation objectives

• A relentless focus on delivery
  • The final dimension is somewhat obvious, but is important to mention, because I’ve encountered transformative efforts in the past that spent so much energy either on structural or theoretical aspects to their “program design” that they actually failed to deliver anything
  • In the case of the Apollo program, part of what makes the story so compelling is the number of times the team needed to innovate to overcome issues that arose, particularly to various design and engineering challenges
  • Again, this is why courageous, committed leadership is so important to transformation. The work is difficult and messy and it’s not for the faint of heart.  Resilience and persistence are required to accomplish great things.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this article has provided some areas to consider in either mapping out or evaluating the health of a transformational effort.  As I covered in my article On Delivering at Speed, there are always opportunities to improve, even when you deliver a complex or high-risk effort.  The point is to be disciplined and thoughtful in how you approach these efforts, so the bumps that inevitably occur are more manageable and the impact they have are minimized overall.

I hope the ideas were worth considering.  Thanks for spending the time to read them.  Feedback is welcome as always.

-CJG 12/29/2024